Faithful Travelers

by James Dodson

  The next day, I came home from school, opening the door just as my brother was flying out. He told me something big was going on over at the Purvis place. We leapt through the hedge and ran across the estate’s broad lawn and I remember feeling thrilled about this because an elderly colored gardener was usually somewhere around to gently shoo us off the property before we got fifty feet onto the yard. We found a police car sitting in the house’s front drive and Burt the reporter standing with a couple officers on the house’s front porch. Burt looked worried and told us sharply to go home or he’d tell on us to our father and one of the policemen ordered us to leave, too, so we left, went home and had hot chocolate in the kitchen, and only later learned that Melvin Purvis, the world-famous G-man, perhaps the most famous man in the world or at least the most famous man in mine, had shot himself dead with the same revolver he’d used to bring down John Dillinger. That was the rumor, at least.

  I never learned the truth about the gun because we moved to Greensboro two or three days later, a few days after my seventh birthday. Greensboro felt a world away from Florence. A few days after we arrived there, my father took my brother and me downtown to see a civil rights demonstration at the Woolworth’s on Main Street. He told us not to be afraid, explaining that we were witnessing history as well as an event that was a long time coming. I remember being a little frightened anyway—all these colored people sitting on the sidewalks on a chill February day placidly singing sweet-sad church hymns while the white people stood and tensely watched. But to tell the truth, I was still thinking about Melvin Purvis and how I was going to miss him.

  “Isn’t that strange,” I admitted to my mother, getting up to refill her wineglass. She watched me pour and smiled. “I can’t unlink these events. They all run together like a ruined watercolor. I never even saw Melvin Purvis yet his death was the first one I ever felt personally. The old South was dying and I never even noticed.”

  “Maybe that was just as well,” my mother reflected. “That way you wouldn’t miss it.”

  “Maybe so,” I replied, sitting back down again. “I did learn one amazing thing from our stop there today.”

  Watching me, she asked what.

  I said Charles Ducker told me Melvin Purvis hadn’t really committed suicide with his own service revolver—he’d been murdered by J. Edgar Hoover. Over the years, Ducker had collected ballistics reports, rental car receipts, all sorts of bits and pieces of circumstantial evidence that added up to a conspiracy theory that sounded like something only Hollywood could have dreamed up. Purvis, a former provost marshal in Africa and prosecutor at the Nuremberg Nazi trials, was apparently about to testify before a Senate subcommittee probing organized crime’s reach into government. Given what is now common knowledge about Hoover’s association with crime figures, Ducker told me, that probably made Melvin Purvis a marked man. Ducker said he was still gathering material on the case but Purvis’s eldest son, now a professor of art at a Boston university, was going to write a book exposing the whole affair.

  “Do you believe it’s true?” my mother asked me.

  “I don’t know. As a reporter, I’ve come to learn things sometimes aren’t what they appear. Then again, I’ve seen stranger things in America. Which may explain why I gave up reporting.”

  My mother thought about this a moment. “Did Ducker say what happened to the family?”

  “I asked him the same question. Particularly about the boy in the red pony wagon. Sad story, I’m afraid. The family sort of fell apart after the father was gone. The boy with the wagon apparently later mysteriously died himself.”

  My mother shook her head and finished her wine. I could see people taking an evening stroll out her living room window, a young couple wearing light jackets and walking a white dog. The nights in Carolina were cooling down, too.

  “The good news, however, is that you appear to be doing splendidly,” I said, shifting the conversation abruptly back to the safer present. But then I realized it wasn’t all that safe, either, and quickly explained to her how she’d impressed all of us with her dazzling self-sufficiency, something that with all due respect none of us had really anticipated. “You’re a tough old bird for a sweet southern lady.”

  “I miss your father,” she admitted. “Sometimes I miss him so much I could die. But then I realize I am doing okay.” She was looking at me with her fine blue eyes, Maggie’s eyes sixty years on.

  “Maggie seems to have had a grand time. She reminds me of you at her age, the way she chatters so.”

  “Amazingly enough, in all those thousands of miles she never once asked how long it would be till we got there. That has to be a new endurance record for seven-year-olds. I probably should call Guinness right now.”

  “Perhaps that’s because she was already where she wanted to be. With you.”

  “Nice to think. But you have to say that because you’re my mother.”

  “How’s my Jack?”

  “Fine. Probably grown a foot by now. I’m trying to figure out how to work a rocket launch and a trip around Africa into the same two-week vacation. I’ve learned you can’t break a pinkie promise.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” she said, then sat for a second or two more before adding, “And how about you?”

  “What?”

  I’d been looking out the window after the couple and their dog, but they were gone.

  “I asked how you were doing. But I really don’t need to hear any more about the fish.”

  I smiled, finished my wine, and said, almost offhandedly, “I’m great. Just great. A nice long drive was good for what ailed me.”

  She didn’t ask what ailed me. I sensed she already knew. She just sat there waiting, staring me down sweetly, waiting for me to spill the beans, as if she had all night to hear it. That’s when I told her about the divorce.

  I thought she might begin to cry or tell me I was a fool or we were a couple of cowards to finally give up. But she surprised me again, merely held her empty wineglass and studied me with concerned calmness. I tried to imagine what was going on in her head. She loved and admired my wife and I had never failed at anything in her eyes. Perhaps she thought we were both self-absorbed fools doing our children a world of harm, like many people would think.

  She patted the couch seat. “Come sit beside me,” she said quietly.

  I got up and went over and sat down beside her and she took my hand. Her hands were rough but warm, like mine. “I’m truly sorry to hear about this. I won’t ask you why because I frankly don’t think it’s anybody else’s business but yours.”

  I said, “I appreciate that, Mom. But I’m not sure either of us knows exactly why yet. Between you and me, I thought this trip out West might give me some insights into this mess. How we got into it, and how we are going to get out without scarring our kids for life.”

  She shook her head, almost fiercely. “Don’t worry about the children. They’re much more resilient than you can even imagine. They won’t be scarred if they know you two love and respect each other, even if your marriage didn’t work. Don’t pay any attention to what other people think or say, either. Nobody can understand what you all have been through. Just take it day by day, minute by minute if you have to. You’ll figure out the right thing to do in time. I have faith in you—both of you. More importantly, darling, your children do, too.”

  I smiled at her and squeezed her hand. I was sitting close enough to smell her Chanel and remembered that my father always gave her a new bottle every other Christmas. I made a mental note to send her a new bottle of Chanel and a lengthy thank-you letter when we got home.

  “You really are a tough old bird,” I whispered as I leaned over to kiss her cheek. “And I mean that in the kindest possible way.”

  “I’ll cry when you’re gone,” she replied, and then blinked back tears as she managed a little smile at me.

  There was a noise and we both turned. Maggie had suddenly appeared, pink, grinning, wrapped coyly in a blue bath towel
. Down the hall the shower was still running. “Gammy?” she said. “Can I have some vanilla ice cream and look at that jewelry again before bed?”

  My mother had set aside half of her jewelry to someday give to Maggie. The other half was going to my brother’s daughter, Rebecca. She smiled at Maggie and then looked at me with raised eyebrows. Ice cream before bed was strictly taboo in our house. But we weren’t in our house.

  “Of course, sweetie,” she said, patting my hand firmly and then releasing it before getting up.

  —

  I drove the borrowed fly rod over to my old friend Pat’s house. He asked me how the equipment had worked and I said it was simply lousy and he should seriously consider demanding his money back. I told him about not catching the biggest trout in the San Juan River and he grinned and offered me a consolation Scotch that I didn’t refuse. I told him more about the trip and he asked me what I got out of it besides undersized trout and a secondhand motor from Oklahoma.

  “I think I learned Maggie has the gift but not the passion for fly-fishing, whereas I have the passion but not the gift. Life’s not a bit fair.”

  “No. But it’s what happens while you’re waiting to go fishing.”

  “God, that’s such a ridiculous cliché,” I told him.

  “Yeah? So’s God.”

  We sat on his screened porch and talked about our daughters, how they were growing up much too quickly and the hard part was knowing when and how to let them go. I told him about the difficulty our mutual friend Silent Sam was having in this respect, letting his daughters go and trying to make sense of his well-made life that hadn’t worked out the way he’d expected.

  “Whose life has worked out the way he expected?” asked Pat, whose own father was dying by painfully slow degrees of a rare nervous system disorder. “I always expected to be president of the United States by now.”

  “That’s funny,” I said, “I always expected you to be in prison.”

  “Very funny. So what did you tell him? To get some serious help, I hope.”

  “Nope. I gave him a couple poets to read, though.”

  Pat laughed. “That must have made him decide to get well fast.”

  I ignored his dig. “The poet Mary Oliver says there are three things you must do in order to be happy in this world,” I said. “You must be able to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends upon it; and when it comes time to let it go, to let it go.”

  “Spoken like a woman who’s caught a few undersized rainbow trout in her time,” Pat said wryly.

  I said it was probably too soon to tell but maybe that’s what this trip had done for me—allowed me to get my hands on a grief I once couldn’t have even imagined, to hold it for a while, and with luck to begin to let it go. Sipping my Scotch, I added that I didn’t know exactly what kind of new world we were going home to face, but it was damn good to be going home.

  “My best educated guess is that you’ll never move back here,” said my oldest friend, as if that possibility had just sunk in.

  I admitted that I didn’t think so. I loved the South but there was just too much sadness there to get my hands around, I said. I’d finally found a home on a hill in the North, a life of children and roses, both of which required a lot of hands-on attention and watering. For the moment, I was clutching this life to my bones with everything I had.

  I said I couldn’t really explain it.

  “I think you just did,” Pat said. He smiled and took my empty Scotch glass. “Go home.”

  —

  We left Greensboro the next morning before dawn, pulled by magnetic north and propelled by the road anthems of Patty Loveless and Trisha Yearwood, reaching the bridge over the Piscataqua River just before midnight. A few early travelers were going over the bridge into Maine, getting a jump on the long Labor Day weekend ahead. I glanced at my odometer and did some rough calculations. My daughter and my dog were both sound asleep and WGBH from Boston was serving up the Tommy Flanagan Trio. Six weeks, eight thousand miles, nineteen gas-ups, and six gallons of Wild Blue Raspberry Gatorade later, we’d come home. Our own sacred circle was almost complete, and I thought about how Black Elk had gone so far only to discover how good this feeling of homecoming felt. Don’t grieve, the poet Rumi said. Anything you lose comes around in another form.

  It was just minutes before my son’s sixth birthday.

  I carried Maggie upstairs to her bed, then went into his room and sat on his empty bed looking at the stars on his dormer ceiling. He would be home tomorrow and we would lie here and talk about storms and gods, rocket ships and roads to Africa. I went outside and sat on the front steps to look at the real stars, wondering what my fellow travelers would choose to remember from our trip West and perhaps, years on, my daughter from the complicated summer when she was seven. As my mother said, these things take time to really know. I realized I had probably been searching for big trout and big answers and that one had proved as elusive as the other. But a long drive is always good and my mother had been right that you’re never really happy until you find a place that feels like home.

  Amos went off into the woods to see how the place was holding up without him, perhaps to have a nice midnight roll in the Fern Bowl. It was a beautiful summer night and I was pleased to find, a short while later, when I went back inside, fresh flowers waiting in a vase with a note from Maggie’s mother, welcoming us home. She’d been there to freshen up the place and, I later discovered, had thoughtfully watered my roses.

  To Muggins

  Acknowledgments

  Writing any book is an act of high-wire faith and there are many people I owe a debt of gratitude for helping coax this book to life. Brian Tart at Bantam is the kind of gifted and eerily patient young editor every writer deserves to work with at least once, and Irwyn Applebaum and Susan Corcoran merit special thanks for their continuing support. While I’m at it, I must fly-cast special heartfelt thanks across the pond to Andy McKillop at Century Books in Britain, who also believed in and encouraged this book from the beginning. I’m grateful as well to my agent Ginger Barber and her colleagues, whose enthusiasm never seems to flag. A few more brief thank-yous are in order: to Geoffrey C. Ward for his brilliant book The West: An Illustrated History; the selected writings of Robert Bly and Joseph Campbell; the reflections of Black Elk; the staff at the wonderful Buffalo Bill and Plains Indian Museum in Cody, Wyoming; the essays of James Carse and E. B. White; and far too many poets to name in one sitting.

  My close friends Pat McDaid, Hugh Kluttz, Terry Meagher, Terry Bartow, Tony Schmitz, Macduff Everton, and Mike Purkey provided deep and useful insights throughout, and a special thank-you must go to Alison Dodson, who unwaveringly encouraged the writing of this book from Day One. Also, Virginia Doty, Kathleen Bennie, Edith Hazard, Winnie Palmer, Patti Ohmans, and Randy Jones for their invaluable support and insights from the distaff side. Gratitude of immeasurable depth goes to my mother, Janet Dodson, for her honest memories and unflinching support, and to Sharon Pitts, a true daughter of the Old West, for assisting our journey. Thanks to Reverend Ellen Shaver for her valuable insights on faith, and Reverend Ed Chalfont for his thought-provoking perspectives. Ditto the staff at Colorado Trails for taking us in on such short notice, and the good people of Hinton, Oklahoma, who know how to make a weary traveler feel right at home.

  Thanks to the fly-fishing staff at L. L. Bean for putting up with my unceasing questions and queries about the second-most fascinating sport on earth, and thank you, Jerry the Mechanic, wherever you are. Thanks to you, Old Blue not only got us safely home but she’s still running like a prairie song.

  Most of all, thank you, Maggie and Amos. No man could ever have finer traveling companions. You make me laugh and believe.

  Also by James Dodson

  FINAL ROUNDS

  A Father, A Son, The Golf Journey of a Lifetime

  About the Author

  JAMES DODSON is a regular columnist for Golf Magazine and an editor
of Departures Magazine. His work has appeared in Gentlemen’s Quarterly, Sports Illustrated, Travel and Leisure, Outside Magazine, and numerous other national publications. He won the Golf Writers of America Award for his columns in 1995 and 1996. His first book, Final Rounds, received the International Network of Golf’s industry honors award for Best Golf Book of 1997.

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